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Productivity Tips For Bloggers From a Bestselling Author

productivity-graph2Steven Pressfield is great example of perseverance for anyone in the creative field including bloggers. His first couple novels never saw print. But he kept at it and 17 years after his college graduation, he finally got a book published and received a paycheck. His later books became bestsellers.

In this podcast interview, he gives a couple productivity tips that have really helped me in my blogging.

The Writer Life is a Battle

At 1:41 of the podcast, Pressfield talks about the writing process as a war. To succeed, you have to have similar qualities of a good warrior; qualities like courage, patience, and long-suffering. He brings up the image of an infantryman that’s gaining ground on the enemy slowly but surely. In the day to day struggle, writing is like that.

This principle has helped me realize that blogging is hard work. Sure, there are days when the words come easily and I knock out a quality post in a couple of minutes. But those days are few and far between. Usually, it takes me awhile to get going. My first few sentences are pretty bad and I have to struggle to stay focused on finishing the post. By the time the post is done, I’m satisfied but I’m mentally tired.

Resistance is the Enemy

At 14:25, the interviewer quotes Pressfield’s book The War of Art:

There’s a secret that real writers know that wannabe writers don’t and the secret is this: it’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Pressfield goes on to talk about Resistance as the negative force that rises up whenever we want to start a creative task. Resistance shows up in many forms: procrastination, self-sabotage, excuses we make up, reasons we give ourselves that we’re not good enough, self doubt, etc. The most important thing for a writer to do is overcome Resistance.

Pressfield says that Resistance comes to us in negative voices. Our task is to ignore the voices and realize that they are bulls**t. They are keeping us from making progress.

I found this principle very helpful because it showed me that I’m not alone in the creative struggle. If a bestselling author has to deal with Resistance, then I will have to deal with it too.

Also, by identifying the enemy, Pressfield helped me not to be surprised by Resistance. I am prepared to deal with it because I know it’s there.

Turn Pro and Stop Being an Amateur

At 25:00, Pressfield gives a great metaphor for overcoming Resistance. He says we have to “turn pro.” When we see ourselves as amateurs, we will yield to Resistance when our circumstances become tough or distractions come up.

But if we think of ourselves as pros, we’ll have the mindset to carve out daily time to pursue our creative endeavors. As pros, we won’t give in to external influences.

Pressfield brings up Kobe Bryant. During the season, his knees may hurt and his back may be sore, but he still suits up and plays in the game. Pros like him don’t make excuses. They see their task as a job instead of a hobby.

Pressfield says a mysterious thing begins to happen when we turn pro. Inspiration starts to flow regularly as we persevere and make it a habit to work on our craft daily.

Further Information

Make sure to listen to the whole interview where Pressfield has more advice for writers. Check out his book The War of Art for an in-depth treatment about productivity and overcoming procrastination in the creative process. Also, he started a new blog, which includes writing tips.

Performancing offers blog management services.

How to Sustain Inspiration in Blogging

idea-light-bulbJason Fried from 37signals talks about sustaining inspiration in this speech at around the 19:40 mark.

He suggests that inspiration is perishable. He contrasts the lifespan between the actual idea and the inspiration for the idea. The idea lasts forever but the inspiration can go away.

He likens inspiration to a perishable good like milk or fruit. Like these goods, inspiration has an expiration date and it doesn’t stay fresh very long.

He advises that if you’re inspired about something, if you motivated to do something, you need to take action as soon as possible. If you wait to do it later, you won’t be as motivated. Every day you don’t take action, your inspiration starts to rot and go away.

Also, you’ll have the most creative energy during that initial spark of inspiration.

Blogging and Inspiration

In blogging, I’ve found Jason’s theory to be true. I have many ideas for blog posts that I came up with in the past. At the time of idea conception, I was excited about the ideas. However, a couple weeks went by and I still hadn’t turned those ideas into blog posts. Now when I think of the ideas, I’m not excited about them and I wonder what ever happened to my inspiration.

On the other hand, if I come up with a good idea and then work on the post right away, writing is much easier and I have a good amount of creative energy and motivation to complete the post. This is why it’s a good idea to read only when you have time to act on it.

You’ll be more productive and your content will be better quality if you’re inspired and motivated rather than trying to “force out” a post after the inspiration has gone away.

Over to You

How do you sustain inspiration? Have you ever experienced “rotting inspiration”?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Improve Your Blog’s Brand by Creating New Jargon

new-jargonYaro Starak has some great advice for bloggers in one of his recent posts. He advises us to create new jargon for our niche. This strategy builds the perception that we are experts who know what we’re talking about. Also, a new term or buzzword can function like other branding elements such as a logo, blog design, or writing style since the term will remind people of our blog.

Borrow Terms From Other Niches

You don’t necessarily have to create something completely new. You can take jargon from other niches and apply them to your niche.

For example, Bill Simmons is a sports writer that’s famous for an NFL playoffs gambling guide. I think one of the reasons his guide became popular is because he gave it a unique name. Instead of just using a generic name like “A Guide to the NFL Playoffs”, he called it “NFL Playoff Manifesto”.

The word “manifesto” is typically used in politics, arts, and technology, but Simmons creatively used it for American football. The unique name of his guide differentiates it from other guides, which gives him an edge in perception and branding. Plus, “manifesto” sounds more authoritative than “guide”.

Help Your Readers Understand Abstract Concepts

Not only does new jargon brand your blog, but it can help your readers understand abstract concepts. For instance, consider Seth Godin’s term purple cow. He invented that term to help online businesses understand the classic marketing concept, unique selling proposition, or USP. USP can be a difficult concept to understand but the metaphor of a purple cow standing out in a field of regular cows makes the concept easier to understand. Also, the concept sticks better since it’s hard to forget a mental image of a purple cow.

Keep Important Ideas Fresh in Your Readers’ Minds

Sometimes a term gets overused and becomes cliche. You can give it a fresh, new name to keep your audience’s attention. For example, some of the basic advice for bloggers is to “write quality content”. We get told over and over that “content is king”. Yaro created a new buzzword, pillar article, to remind us the importance of quality content. Also, his term helps us think about quality content in a more concrete way. Chris Garrett and Brian Clark have similar words, flagship content and cornerstone content, respectively.

Make Your New Concept More Memorable

If you come up with a totally new philosophy or idea, you’ll definitely want a short, catchy buzzword to quickly describe it. A short phrase is much more likely to spread virally than a long-winded explanation. Consider Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek. He uses the term lifestyle design to refer to his philosophy of escaping the 9-5 job and living your dream life. And he calls the people who are successfully implementing the philosophy the new rich.

Give an Unnamed Concept a Name

Finally, you don’t even have to actually develop the concept. You can take an existing but nameless concept and give it a memorable name. (Of course, give credit to the original source.) For instance, Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term 10,000 hours rule, which states that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve expertise in a skill. But he got the concept from chess. Studies have shown that it takes at least 10,000 hours of chess practice before you can become a grandmaster. Gladwell took this concept and applied it to many different fields in his best-selling book, Outliers.

Over to You

Have you ever created a new buzzword?

What are some ideas for new jargon that could work in your niche?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Why Being Self-Centered Can Actually Help Your Blog

Brian Clark from Copyblogger recently released a free report entitled The Lateral Action Guide to Becoming a Creative Entrepreneur. I just finished reading it and like most of Brian’s stuff, it was very good.

I was surprised though at one of his recommendations. He advised aspiring entrepreneurs to be self-centered.

He pointed to 37signals, a popular software company that’s become very successful by only creating products that they themselves would find useful. On page 14, he quoted the CEO, Jason Fried:

We just build stuff we want to use. If we need it, they need it.

It was surprising to see this principle from Brian because one of his main tenets is focusing on the needs of your audience. I was a little confused but as I read on, Brian demonstrated that self-centeredness and focusing on your audience doesn’t necessarily contradict each other.

If you’re like many bloggers, you’re in a niche that you’re passionate about. Therefore, you are part of the audience you aim to serve. If you can create something that will help you, it will probably help your audience too.

Consider one of Brian’s products, the popular Thesis theme for WordPress. As a writer that’s not skilled in tech or design, he could sympathize with the barriers writers face when publishing online. Therefore, he partnered with a designer to create an easy-to-use, attractive theme.

Here’s another example. Pat Flynn setup a blog as a reference tool to record his notes for an upcoming architecture test. He was not looking to make money. But because of his notes, his blog attracted traffic and multiple readers told him he should write an ebook. He wrote an ebook based on his notes, did some research about online marketing, and then started selling his book. Soon, his blog was earning him a full-time income. You can listen to his story here.

I read somewhere in an interview that Perez Hilton, the popular celeb gossip blogger, blogs for himself and doesn’t really focus on traffic. He said he would blog even if no one was reading his site. That’s how much he enjoys writing and following celebrities. And there must be many other celeb gossip fans since his blog is one of the most trafficked sites on the planet.

I looked back at my best posts on various blogs and found that I wrote many of them as warnings to myself. For example, I reread this post when I’m tempted to overextend myself and manage too many blogs. And I wrote this post to increase my patience and to remind myself that successful blogging is a long-term project.

It can often be hard to figure out what your audience wants. But if you consider your own needs, you might just find that they are similar to your audience’s needs.

What do you think about the self-centered principle?

Performancing offers blog management services.

Dave Grohl: Another celebrity disses Twitter

Outspoken Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has laid into Twitter, or — more accurately — the people who use it, suggesting that they are wasting their time.

“F**k Twitter! That’s the biggest waste of time. If people got their head out of their ass, they might f**king get out and accomplish something.”

Presumably, he’s hurling his insult at the stereotypical couch potato Twitter user who simply tweets about what they’ve just had for lunch, rather than the myriad of interesting people (both celebrities and not) who update their Twitter accounts with interesting and insightful words.

Funny how Grohl chose to waste his time slating a service he doesn’t like. Many people who don’t use Twitter just get on with their lives without making a big fuss in order to garner some publicity.

Via

A Blogging Case Study: Covering a Big Event in My Niche

A couple days I tried an experiment in which I covered a big event in my niche.

My blog is in the gaming niche. More specifically, I write about Magic The Gathering (MTG), a popular trading card game. MTG recently had their World Championship Tournament. This tournament happens once a year and take four days to complete. It is the most prestigious event on the calendar with over a quarter million dollars in the prize pool. This year the winner received a $45,000 check.

I knew that many players would be following the tournament online so I did my best to cover it myself. My hope was to get a lot of traffic by ranking for the relevant keywords that would come up as the tournament progressed.

I was pretty happy with the results 🙂

big-event-traffic-graph

The graph above shows my visitors from the last 30 days. As you can see, my traffic had basically plateaued in the first 25 days. But during the tournament, my traffic grew sharply and the two days after the tournament I had my first ever days with over 1,000 visitors.

In the rest of this post, I’ll share what I did specifically. Hopefully, you can apply them on your own blog and get traffic spikes too.

Improve Your Speed

Speed is important because most of the topics from a big event are time-sensitive. The interest for the topics is high during the event but after the event finishes, people will quickly move on to the next big thing.

I found this out the hard way earlier this year. I was doing some work for the sports section of a site. The Super Bowl had just finished so I started working on an editorial piece about the game. I finished the piece five days later and sent it to sports blogs to see if they would link to it. I got a couple of links but some of the blogs said the Super Bowl was already old news so didn’t link. They said if I had published a couple days earlier, I would’ve gotten a link.

Once you find out some noteworthy news from the event, publish a post about it as soon as possible. Otherwise, the news will get old and you’ll miss out on the traffic from the initial buzz.

For the Worlds tournament, I published my posts within 12 hours of the news being released.

Work Long and Hard

You may have heard that writing more posts results in getting more traffic. That is usually true and the traffic is magnified when you write a lot of posts about a big event.

Typically, I only write 1-3 posts per week but during the tournament, I wrote 7 posts.  Those 7 posts totaled about 7,000 words. This was a big change since I usually only write 750 – 1500 words a week. Needless to say, I sacrificed some sleep to keep up with the tournament and write all those words.

Therefore, if you want to get a lot of traffic from big events, make sure you have enough time to cover various issues and news. And be willing to work hard during that time period since you’ll have an increased workload.

Add Value

I don’t think it’s not enough to get people to visit your site. If all you do is cover the event, they may not have incentive to become a repeat visitor. There are going to be other blogs that cover the event too so you need a way to differentiate yourself from them. You need to give your new visitors a reason to come back to your blog. You can increase your chance of turning them to repeat visitors by adding value in your coverage. Instead of just rehashing the news, figure out a way to add something extra.

I tried to add value in a couple of ways.

During the tournament, the hosts interviewed players on video and asked them about their strategies. The videos did not include notes, so I took notes of the videos and added them to my blog. My hope is that people will bookmark my posts for reference since text is generally a better reference source than video.

Also, since I’m a winning player and I keep up with the tournament scene, I made sure to give my thoughts on the various strategies being used in the tournament. Instead of just reporting the strategies, I evaluated them. My hope is that people will come back to my site to see what I have to say about new strategies that get developed in the future.

Use Relevant Keywords

If you want to get a lot of traffic from the search engines, you need to discern the keywords people will be searching with. Then, include those keywords in the titles of your posts. I think most bloggers get too “cute” with their titles or don’t pay enough attention to keywords and post titles.

For each post, I identified a couple related keywords on the topic and included them in the title. For example, the winning player had unique strategy which he learned from a friend, who was not in the tournament. His friend had an interesting name for the strategy. He called it “Naya Lightsaber”. I used that term in the title of one of my posts.

The winning strategy always gets a lot of attention and I was fortunate enough to get #1 spot on Google for naya lightsaber. My post on the topic is only three days old but it is already one of the top 10 most trafficked posts on my blog for the last 30 days with over 1,000 pageviews.

Need help covering the big events in your niche? Performancing offers blog management services so you don’t have to do all the work.

WordPress.com proves why you’re always at the mercy of free blogging platforms

The news that Automattic has finally rolled out email subscriptions on WordPress.com goes to prove the point that, no matter how good a free blogging platform is, you’re always at its mercy when it comes to features.

That might sound obvious, but it’s something that’s easy for new bloggers to overlook.

While it’s wise to keep a blog simple, features such as allowing your readers to subscribe via email are near essential when it comes to marketing, because many visitors don’t know what RSS or care to learn how to use it.

If you host your own blog, it’s not a problem because you can either find a plugin to handle email subscriptions, or get Feedburner, Aweber or some other third-party service on board, because you have the ability to add custom code.

You might think I’m about to negate the arguments I raised in my “Who is Posterous good for?” post. In fact, Posterous — though socially well-connected — currently offers even less features than WordPress.com, though it’s arguably a lot easier to publish multimedia rich content to.

I think the free blogging platforms are very good for allowing new bloggers to cut their teeth, despite the issues surrounding starting a blog without a custom domain name and then having to migrate later if the blog becomes popular (all major free blogging platforms allow you to use your own domain name, but I doubt many newbies take advantage of that).

Seeing what I consider basic functionality only just added to WordPress.com proves that, if you want total control over your blog, you do need to self-host.

And, if you’re serious about building a business from blogging, but don’t have all the technical know-how just yet, it’s still worth getting help to host your own blog, because it will be infinitely more customisable further down the line when you decide to tailor it to exactly your own needs.

Hats off to Automattic for adding this feature to WordPress.com. Just remember that you can do so much more with your own version of WordPress.

Microblogging drives mobile Internet usage

If you’re in any doubt that adding geotagging to Twitter is a good idea, the latest survey from Novarra has found that microblogging services are driving the use of the mobile Internet.

In the past year, mobile usage of URL shortening services such as bit.ly and tinyurl.com — near-essential for sharing links on Twitter — has leapt by 1,068%, while page views of Twitter grew by 3,500% in the first half of 2009.

VP of marketing at Novarra, Randy Cavaiani, said that Twitter was a great viral tool for exposing consumers to new and interesting content.

These statistics are bound to be encouraging for those pushing uptake of the mobile Internet, and it’s not too surprising that Twitter is particularly popular given that interesting things generally happen when users are mobile.

Increased functionality, such as geotagging, more interesting third-party apps, and more mobile operators opening up Twitter via SMS, should propel Twitter usage even further.